A solitary clock behind bars, floors forbidden to street shoes, exit signs— one, two, three, four: fine—& waxy cries of boys, one mine, practicing their dribbling & bank shots. My eyes closed, the volley of Spaldings pounds like opening night of Operation Desert Storm, or Shield, or whatever war our Sonys dust up next ….
If I was a real guy, said my friend Jason, and I got an e-mail like that, what would you do? Someone had told him he was a big sexy dreamboat and he was trying to figure out if he should buy a sports car and a condom or take an Alka-Seltzer and go to…
“This Book of Poems Has Been Printed on Recycled Paper” Isn’t it a form of reincarnation— the sports page or an ad for vitamins becoming, miraculously, the space where a love poem finds itself? a discarded shopping list (cereal, oranges, soap) returning to life as the backdrop for a sonnet or villanelle? I stare at…
From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…
Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…
It started with my mother using the walker to get from her bedside to the bathroom and me saying wow, and wonderful. It started one morning when my mother looked in the mirror and asked: Who the fuck is that? Disgusted. It started with the medicines: the ones that make her cheeks…
I agree with the central conclusion of all pop songs: you’re gorgeous and I’m angry. You walked into the party like the last thing you’d ever do was walk onto a yacht. In the hospital, I had time to consider the ever-so-slightly corrupt taste of your freshly cleaned armpits. I was always feverish to pry…
Halfway through the song I catch her, Irma Thomas and her band slowing down the heart in a 6/8 swing. How many quarters did I once pour like honey down the jukebox’s throat to make her sing again? That was Markey’s Bar. I found some peace there but can’t drink it back. This is California…
Today I plant sassafras and pickerel. Tomorrow, wild sarsaparilla and checkerberry. Will they take root here? The crows enter my yard. They remind me of ink slabs Chinese calligraphers used—not until mixed with water did their black ink breathe and broth. Each morning, goat hairbrush in hand, they sat near willows, against a dropping moon,…
Summer 1980 - Digital